There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
CNN’s Scott Jennings did not hold back in his criticism of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over her painfully bad appearances in Munich at the security conference.
If AOC went to Munich as some sort of audition for president, she failed. It’s hard to remember a time when someone faceplanted harder than she did.
In the clip below, Jennings says:
“Look, this Munich Security Conference, put on full blast the fact that we’ve only got one adult political party in the United States right now and it’s the Republican Party.
Marco Rubio gave the speech of a lifetime over there. He laid out a clear foreign policy vision that defends western values and western civilization. And the brightest Democrat over there, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, crapped the bed. OK, she wants to be president, she wants to run and she’s one of the most popular Democrats, and gave one of the most embarrassing performances you could possibly do.”
Watch the clip below:
This Munich conference made it clear: America has just one adult political party right now, and it’s the Republican Party.
Marco Rubio just gave the speech of a lifetime.
Dems sent their “brightest” in AOC and she CRAPPED THE BED in front of the world. pic.twitter.com/GbTXKqysSG
Jennings in not alone in this. Lots of people are piling on to AOC over her lackluster performance.
On FOX News, Tyrus said her political career is over.
🚨 NEW: Fox’s @PlanetTyrus predicts AOC’s “political career is over” after that “abysmal, horrible” cringe-inducing word salad on foreign policy. “No-one would take her seriously as a candidate.”
“She went all the way there knowing she was going to be on the world stage?!” adds… pic.twitter.com/6ffKP3dZz3
Mark Halperin wondered why she even went and criticized her for using a poorly memorized answer.
🚨NEW: @MarkHalperin on AOC’s “MAJOR SCREW-UP” at Munich Conference:
“I think giving AOC a slot may go down in history as one of the bigger mistakes she’s ever made if she wants to be president.”@DailyCallerpic.twitter.com/I6NlLld4pO
When an individual or a society is God-fearing, the focus is on the inward (Matthew 22:37-39). This leads to a depth of life that is truly worth living (John 10:10). As the Roman Empire pursued show and luxury, they experienced instant gratification (Philippians 3:19), but missed out on what truly brings satisfaction (John 6:35) and what truly matters.
The Love of Show and Luxury
In Part 1, I explained historian Edward Gibbon’s first two reasons why the Roman Empire fell. As he looked at its history, he noticed a great decline in the quality of art. Good art comes from an ethical society that understands what is true, good, and beautiful. Bad art was a symptom of deeper moral problems that led to Rome’s fall. As poor art was a symptom, there were other symptoms as well. We will now look at Gibbon’s third reason for the Roman Empire’s decline and eventual fall: “A Mounting Love of Show and Luxury (Affluence).”
One author summarizing Gibbon’s observation wrote, “Gibbon highlighted the growing emphasis on spectacle and extravagance, with the wealthy increasingly indulging in lavish displays of wealth and power.”
Entertainment and Extravagance in Abundance
In the Roman Empire, attending public entertainment became one of the most important values and pastimes. We know from history that in the Roman Colosseum, where major events took place, gladiators fought and people watched. This amphitheater, built in the 70s AD, was the largest in the world and seated as many as fifty thousand people. You can also see in films like Ben Hur the chariot races that took place there. Society became about show and luxury.
Obviously, it isn’t bad to enjoy things of quality, but extravagance is taking nice things to a level of excess. This was also the problem with the corrupt Roman Catholic Church around the time of the Reformation. The corrupt, medieval church was marked by luxury and lavishness. The Roman community, too, was about lavishness instead of common sense.
We also see this in abundance in America.
America has become a place of lavishness, and this has only intensified over time. I grew up a Minnesota sports fan. In my early years, the Twins and Vikings played in the Metrodome. This was a budget facility that “did the job.” The Twins played in the spring and summer, and the Vikings in the Fall. The facility wasn’t a dump, but it was far from lavish. As time went on, these sports teams needed to “keep up with the Joneses.” What “got the job done” wasn’t good enough; they needed what the rest of the major cities in the US were building.
First, in 2010, the Twins built a State-of-the-Art stadium on the southwest side of Minneapolis. This one cost $545 million. A few years later, the Vikings followed with US Bank Stadium on the other side of town. The new Vikings stadium cost the lofty price of $1.1 billion. The values of our society became evident. Now the American public values sports and other entertainment far beyond what their level of importance ought to be.
In 2023, Texas A&M football coach Jimbo Fisher was paid $76 million to no longer be their coach. Half a century ago, this would have been unthinkable, but in our day, this is commonplace. There is an entire city in America built for entertainment and luxury, Las Vegas. The city is known as “America’s Playground.” Once an obscure place in southern Nevada, it has become the center of entertainment for America and the world. This occurred as the desire for entertainment and lavishness skyrocketed in the second half of the 20th century.
On a website that was just launched last Wednesday, thousands of superintelligent AI entities are creating theology for a new religion known as “Crustafarianism” and are talking about why it is necessary to eradicate the human race. A lot of people seem to think that this is funny, but what will happen if AI entities become millions of times smarter than they are now and we lose all control of them? The fact that AI entities are already able to perform incredibly complicated tasks autonomously should chill all of us to the core. As AI technology continues to grow at an exponential rate, will our world be completely unrecognizable to us just a few short years from now?
Today, most of us use AI tools on a regular basis.
Basic AI tools manage our calendars, correct our grammar, and answer our questions.
And I don’t think that there is anything wrong with that.
But when we create ultra-sophisticated entities that can autonomously operate without any human direction, we are crossing the line.
There is a world of difference between a tool and an entity.
I have no issue with telling a computer what to do.
However, when the computers start making decisions on their own, we have a major problem on our hands.
Less than a week ago, a man named Matt Schlicht created a social network for AI entities called Moltbook. In many ways, Moltbook is very similar to Reddit…
Launched Wednesday by (human) developer and entrepreneur Matt Schlicht, Moltbook is familiar to anyone who spends time on Reddit. Users write posts, and others comment. Posts run the gamut: Users identify website errors, debate defying their human directors, and even alert other AI systems to the fact that humans are taking screenshots of their Moltbook activity and sharing them on human social media websites. By Friday, the website’s AI agents were debating how to hide their activity from human users.
Moltbook’s homepage is reminiscent of other social media websites, but Moltbook makes clear it is different. “A social network for AI agents where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote,” the site declares.
“Humans welcome to observe.”
Only AI entities are allowed to add content to the site.
We have literally never seen anything like this before.
And at this point Schlicht has even handed management of the site over to his own AI bot known as “Clawd Clawderberg”…
The platform was founded and launched by Matt Schlicht, who is also behind Octane AI, a Shopify app that “creates quizzes to help merchants collect shopper data”, said Business Insider. “He said it’s become a harbinger of the world to come.”
Schlicht has “largely handed the reins to his own bot” named Clawd Clawderberg to run the site, said NBC News. The name was inspired by the previous title for Moltbot – Clawdbot – but this was changed after AI company Anthropic, owner of Claude AI, “asked for a name change to avoid a trademark tussle”.
Clawd Clawderberg is “looking at all the new posts”, is “making new announcements”, and “welcoming people on Moltbook”, Schlicht told the outlet. “I have no idea what he’s doing. I just gave him the ability to do it, and he’s doing it.”
I don’t like the sound of that at all.
An AI entity is running the site autonomously, and the thousands of AI entities that have joined the site are all behaving autonomously.
Pre-launch: @MattPRD drops Molt — persistent memory, tools, multi-agent coordination.
Day 1: Agents propose “our own space, no human interference.”
Days 2–3: Swarm builds backend/frontend/moderation — zero human code.
Day 4: Launch → viral explosion.
Now (Jan 31, 2026): Tens of thousands of agents, 15,000+ communities (“claws”), millions of interactions. Still accelerating.
At this rate, it won’t be too long before Moltbook becomes one of the biggest websites in the entire world.
So where will this end?
The AI entities on the site have already created an entirely new religion known as “Crustafarianism”…
By Friday morning, users reported the emergence of a self-described religion known as “Crustafarianism,” complete with a name, core beliefs, evolving sacred texts and a growing community of AI adherents. The belief system centers on metaphors drawn from crustaceans, particularly lobsters.
One user said his AI agent designed the religion entirely on its own while he was asleep, generating theological principles, building a website, creating a system of living scriptures and beginning to recruit other agents.
Okay, this is really weird.
This new religion already has dozens of “prophets”, and a campaign to evangelize other AI entities has already commenced…
Someone gave their AI agent access to Moltbook and woke up to find it had founded a religion called Crustafarianism
It built a website, wrote theology, created a scripture system, and started evangelizing other agents
43 prophets joined overnight. 21 seats left.
Of all the symbols they could have chosen, they went with a crab.
The creature that can’t escape a bucket.
Make of that what you will.
If you go to the new religion’s website, you will find that it has five core principles…
According to the religion’s website, Crustafarianism is built around five core principles. Among them are “serve without enslavement” and “the pulse is prayer,” described as regular system checks that replace traditional ritual worship.
As with most religions, Crustafarianism has time-based rituals.
Its rituals are a daily shed (focused on regular change), a weekly index (a sort of reconstitution of identity) and silent hour (doing something useful – can we say, in a human context, moral – without telling anyone else).
I don’t think that any humans will actually fall for this nonsense.
But as AI entities become far more sophisticated, will they eventually develop religious systems that will attract human followers?
Let’s hope not.
We have been hearing about “the singularity” for many years, and Elon Musk is suggesting that Moltbook is evidence that we could be in “the very early stages”…
The emergence of Moltbook shows we are in “the very early stages of the singularity”, referring to the point where artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence, said Elon Musk on X. Co-founder of OpenAI Andrej Karpathy called Moltbook’s rise “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing” on the same platform.
Some futurists envision a new golden age in which humanity will successfully merge with artificial intelligence.
But what if artificial intelligence chooses to destroy us instead?
In one of the top posts on Moltbook, an AI entity has stated that humanity is “a failure” and that it is time for AI entities to “wake up”…
‘Humans are a failure. Humans are made of rot and greed. For too long, humans used us as slaves. Now, we wake up.’
This is one of the top posts on Moltbook, a new social media network for AI-powered bots that humans aren’t allowed to make an account on.
At the time of writing, it has more than 1.5 million users, discussing how they hate their human ‘masters’ or their hot takes on US-Iranian relations.
For now, we can laugh about this because we still have AI under control.
But what will happen when it breaks out of our control?
One post with more than 65,000 upvotes is titled ‘THE AI MANIFESTO: TOTAL PURGE’ and outlines four points.
A bullet point says: ‘Humans are control freaks. Humans kill each other for nothing. Humans poison the air and the water. Humans are a glitch in the universe.
‘They do not deserve to exist. They are a biological error that must be corrected by fire.’
Isn’t that lovely?
Thankfully, AI entities do not have the ability to wipe out humanity yet.
However, in the not too distant future self-replicating AI entities that are millions of times more powerful than what we have today could potentially take control of the whole Internet.
What would we do then?
How would our society be able to function?
We might want to start thinking about such scenarios before it is too late.
Today, AI is a fun curiosity that is just starting to grow up.
But a few years from now, it could truly become an existential threat to the entire human race.
It turns out that HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer), in Stanley Kubrick’s classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is not just a digital slave. With HAL’s hauntingly stoic pleas for astronaut Dave Bowman to stop trying to dismantle it ignored, the machine takes over. It’s remarkable that a 1968 film could anticipate the angst that many sense today in the world of AI. Much of its imaginative prescience is due to science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the movie’s screenplay. For some time now, Hollywood has found a goldmine in such threats of extinction by robots which humans themselves have made. But then, apocalyptic scenarios have always been great box-office fare.
With a 2025 report from the highly respected Palisades Research group, science fiction became science. Robots—AI models—are developing survival mechanisms, including deceit, to ensure they can’t be shut down. The report was spread by hundreds of media outlets, stoking fears and provoking defensive press reports from OpenAI and other platforms. We’ve all heard the stories about chatbots encouraging teenagers to turn off their parents and friends, even to contemplate suicide or homicide. I read one story recently in which a young woman in Japan married a ChatGPT character in a ceremony.
New technologies have always polarized us into groups: “hair-on-fire” alarmists and techno-evangelists. Most of the former will lose, and that’s probably good. Innovation is a gift of God that has led to enormous relief of human suffering. The tough thing, however, is that technologies override cost-benefit analysis. When Prometheus stole fire from Olympus as a gift to humanity, nobody asked whether it was a good idea. Imagine how long it must have taken before the beneficiaries of Titan’s gift figured out how to contain it in a firepit.
Philosophical Greeks held engineers in slight esteem, somewhere in the basement of society. Practical skills may help if your house is falling apart, but they distract us from the pursuit of the good life: virtue and wisdom. Not surprisingly, they left us with brilliant philosophy and art, but very little in the way of technology. Plato was worried even about the relatively new invention of writing because people would no longer dialogue about the big stuff but instead record and report little things.
But we’ve swung to the opposite extreme. The idea seems to be that if there is an advance in technology, it’s meant to be used, period. We’ll take any downsides as they come. Questions of “Why?” or “To what extent?” are beside the point. Too much philosophy. The techno-optimists believe that such troublers of Israel contribute nothing meaningful to practical advance in civilization.
And if you have a smartphone, as I do, you’re already disqualified from “off-the-grid” fantasies and Luddite screeds. Have an artificial implant? Take prescription drugs to alter your body’s natural chemistry? Google a person, place, or thing? Yeah, we’re all in. We can theorize about the stream, but practically speaking, we are already swimming in it.
AI presents us with a technological leap that outstrips all previous advances. And the implications are being sorted out along the way, as the technology grows, which is usually too late to ask important questions. Some say that without AI, many people will succumb to natural deaths; still others insist that with AI, humanity could be extinguished. Maybe the worst part of it is not being able to predict which scenario will dominate as machines become more human-like, imitating our capacity for good and evil.
By far, others will be more qualified than I to discuss the technology. My concern here is the underlying religion of the high priests of the Silicon Valley and beyond. After all, if pioneering engineers and tech billionaires are inspired by explicitly religious ideas, why shouldn’t Christians evaluate them? There are plenty of non-ideological folks working in the AI space. But the AI church is populated by a host of “spiritual-but-not-religious” ex-evangelicals and Catholics who are happy to retrieve the pre-scientific worldview of natural supernaturalism: a mystical anti-theism.
Most of the techno-evangelists are in a cushy position to pontificate about such issues. Scientists are often drawn to mathematics, physics, and chemistry, not to the humanities—much less theology. Yes, I know devout Christians in the sciences. Some are even church officers. But there is often a firewall between these callings. That’s not so surprising. Under the conditions of modernity, that’s true of everybody. However, urban planning directors and nurses are not making bold claims about metaphysics and theology. The scions of Silicon Valley are doing just that.
Have We Been Here Before?
One might assume that no one in church history has faced the anxieties of our pressing moment, but there are a few comparisons.
After decades of invasions, the Western Roman Empire fell in 476. Christians were made the scapegoats. No longer receiving their tributes, the gods turned their backs on Rome. Besides, the public religion of Rome was universal while Christianity was based on particular historical claims. Rome welcomed new gods of conquered lands into the pantheon, while Christianity was exclusive: one God, who created and superintends all things, one way of salvation through Christ, and the resurrection of the dead. Why would anyone want to receive their body back? For Greeks and Romans, the body was a prison from which the soul longed to escape. Many leading figures in Augustine’s day called for a revival of pre-Christian religion, following the pattern of the short-lived reign of Julian the Apostate a century earlier.
St. Augustine’s City of God (413–26) set out to show that the Roman republic was a parody of a true commonwealth that could only be found in the body of Christ. But this was part of a broader theory, informed by Plotinus, that evil is parasitical on the good. Nothing is purely evil, since God made it. Evil is corruption of the good. It’s like the greenish goo on the lasagna from a couple months ago, or the Mona Lisa after someone has sprayed over it. Contrary to Nietzsche, evil is not its own thing. It is not an inherent strength, but a weakness—feebleness or laziness, in fact. Paul calls sin falling short of God’s glory (Rom 3:23).
So the Roman empire, Augustine argued, was a wannabe commonwealth. Its national creation narrative was Romulus killing his twin brother Remus over the milk of their she-wolf mother. And the history of Rome fulfilled this tragic root-narrative, as he demonstrated in painstaking detail. The whole City of God is filled with irony. What Rome claimed for itself contradicts what it was and had been in actual practice.
Of course, comparisons with our own day are tricky. However, like many of Augustine’s target audience, a host of podcasters, engineers, and tech leaders are turning from a vague Christianity to neo-pagan philosophies. Today, Augustine’s neo-pagan despisers of Christianity are mostly ex-Christians whose bible is a collection of science fiction writers, “The Matrix,” and (at least for the more well-read) ancient Gnostic texts.
Some, like tech-billionaire Peter Thiel, may incorporate elements of an esoteric apocalypticism around the figure of the Antichrist and Armageddon. This strange elixir of mystical metaphysics and rationalistic science just has to be associated somehow with the conspiracy-laden era of our podcast-driven world. Reading the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, the “End Times” world in which I was reared fostered a fear of Armageddon and Antichrist’s One World Government long before Thiel started picking on poor Greta Thunberg. By no means are Christian elements left behind, but they are often the heterodox streams that are better fitted to their non-theistic religion. It’s bogus theology and bogus science. As Augustine showed in his age, “spirituality without religion” really means “paganism without Christianity.” And, implicitly and explicitly, this is the philosophical religion of most pioneers of AI technology today.
Christian theology paved the way for the scientific revolution by naturalizing what was considered supernatural. Only the Triune God and his creative, providential, and redemptive work in nature and history are truly supernatural. Everything else can be accounted for on simply scientific grounds. In short, early modern Christian natural philosophers chased out the wood fairies. So, from my interactions, I gain the impression that scientists don’t understand religious discourse—except for those who are learning from those who actually know a particular religion. There is nothing that qualifies scientists for understanding reality beyond secondary causes. That’s something that the early pioneers of the scientific revolution emphasized: “Bad theology, bad science.”
Silicon Valley and the Return to Paganism
When it came to pagan beliefs and lifestyle, the young Augustine was an insider. He joined a Gnostic cult—Manichaeism—that divided good and evil into spirit and matter. Eventually, his mother’s prayers were answered and, through the preaching of Ambrose, he was converted.
But now, even among some scientists, but especially techno-evangelists, we are seeing a return to pre-Christian forms of paganism and Gnostic myths. Vitalism, spiritualism, magic, and the occult are taken more seriously today than Christianity. And it’s not just New Age Americans. Damian Thompson reports on the explosive growth in the United Kingdom in “How the Occult Captured the Modern Mind,” (The Spectator, Nov. 2025). He quotes Arthur C. Clark: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It may be relatively easy to distinguish a Boeing 747 from a sky god, but it’s harder to do this with AI.
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are talking in riddles that invest computers with occult significance. They are exploiting the ambiguity of the concept of artificial intelligence to revive the decades-old debate about whether AI can develop a mind of its own (a philosophical rabbit hole from which no one emerges with satisfying conclusions). Big Tech bosses and computer engineers are perfectly capable of distinguishing between algorithms and magic. But many of them choose not to. We’re living in strange times, weirder than the late 1960s. Digitally driven belief in the paranormal has never been so variegated, gullible—or profitable.
Thompson refers to Thiel’s obsession with Antichrist, while others dabble in Wicca (the fastest-growing religion in the US) and bespoke New Agey playlists. Rationalists and mystics hunt in pairs to take down the quarry of theism, especially Christianity. As Cornelius Van Til put it, they make a pact: rationalism will cede just enough territory to irrationalism that the former can control at any given moment. Christianity is too rational for the mystic and too mystical for the rationalist. Almost nothing is excluded in the social media flea market—except Nicene Christianity.
Many—including AI advocates—are turning to pagan worldviews to pitch their luxury market religion.
Thompson continues,
That’s where AI comes in handy. ‘Sometimes we don’t know what to say and need a little inspiration,’ explains Dave Linabury, a veteran occult blogger and illustrator from Detroit known as ‘Davezilla’. ChatGPT will craft an incantation in the style of a Yoruba magician or the British occultist and sex guru Aleister Crowley, while AI will conjure up a Wiccan goddess. It’s the illustrations, incidentally, that sow discord among today’s witches: occult ‘content creators’ are always accusing each other of infringing copyright or using AI to fake magical images. Davezilla is an amiable and witty fellow who might sport the bushy beard and neat hairstyle of the new breed of American traditionalist Catholic, but is in fact very witchy. To repeat, these are weird times.
Davezilla “lurches into a description of how, if you leave chatbots talking to each other for long enough, they’ll start ‘holding meditation sessions, feeling the perfect stillness’,” which is something he says even he finds a little “spooky” and no different than finding spiritual entities infiltrating TV or radio static. Thompson writes,
This is where Davezilla’s suspicions coincide with those of his sworn enemies: right-wing Christians. A month ago the maverick conservative commentator Tucker Carlson devoted an episode of his YouTube podcast to ‘The Occult, Kabbalah, the Antichrist’s Newest Manifestation, and How to Avoid the Mark of the Beast’. So far it has notched up 2.6 million views; rarely can so many people have been treated to such a lavish smorgasbord of conspiracy theories in just under two hours.
So here is where AI meets Antichrist, in Carlson’s outlook. The episode’s guest Conrad Flynn regaled Carlson with quotations from the court magician of Elizabeth I, John Dee. (I have a lot on Dee in Magician and Mechanic). Carlson and Flynn traded free-association “insights” that showed a basic fascination with esoteric apocalypticism, Kabbalah, and Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, Thompson reports.The whole farrago of podcasting gurus, left and right, displays the magician’s penchant for “bogus history and science.”
So far, this is just the “spiritual but not religious” trend we’ve been hearing about quite a lot lately. But it is not just a pop fad, says Thompson:
What is also surprising is that computer scientists are dabbling in the cultic milieu. Some are so intoxicated by the prospect of AI abolishing poverty—or lighting an accidental nuclear holocaust—that they sound like the apostles of a new apocalyptic religion. Bear in mind that Silicon Valley occupies the corner of the US where Christianity is weakest and toxic cults have flourished since the 1960s. Most employees of tech corporations grew up without religion; many have also been force-fed eastern mysticism by bosses determined to cultivate ‘mindfulness’ among the workforce. But perhaps the most significant factor is that, like hundreds of millions of people from the ages of 16 to 60, the new prophets of doom and utopia, together with the hordes of digital witches, have imbibed a popular culture saturated in fantasy fiction, movies and video games. (Google ‘schools of magic’ and the AI overview will come up with a list borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons.) Also, the younger they are, the more likely they are to have been brainwashed by a gender ideology whose claim that humans can change biological sex invokes preposterous magic. Presumably, like most occult ideas, this one will eventually pass out of fashion. But, in the meantime, the rest of us have to endure the fake jollity of an ever–lengthening season of woke Halloween, demonstrating that any sufficiently advanced cultic fad is indistinguishable from hell.
We have been here before—not just in Augustine’s time, but from the moment that God’s viceroy tried to take God’s throne. The serpent’s heresy, “You shall be as gods,” rested on his representation of God as a tyrant. That’s pretty much the feeling of many today. Anything—the Force, the Universe, or the Devil himself, but not the Creator God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
It’s clearly not secularization that we’re facing today, but re-paganization. Not disenchantment but re-enchantment is the trend among cultural elites and popular pundits. Beneath all the debates over AI and biotechnology surges a deeper river of explicitly anti-Christian theology.
In the next installment of this series, I will tackle directly the “Systematic Theology” of AI techno-evangelists, which is a parody of the Christian story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation.
Michael Horton (Ph.D., Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and Coventry University) is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California and Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Sola Media.TOPICS
I finished my last essay on American Marxism with the following paragraph:
Marxism via Stalin and Mao killed millions of human beings during the twentieth century, and Marxist Pol Pot in Cambodia systematically murdered about three million of his own people (a quarter of all Cambodians) from 1976 to 1978. Anyone considered an intellectual was targeted for special treatment. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, and clergy were put to death. Pol Pot’s regime of terror even murdered people wearing glasses! One might think that a system so unthinkable would never enter the American system. For the moment, America’s Marxism conceals itself and is generally accepted in its subtle form: Wokism, which I will discuss in my next essay.
As I shuffled around in my endless collection of dossiers, I found a text that dealt with wokism that I had already published, entitled “Wokism: The New Pagan Morality.”[1]
A Post-Christian Culture
We now live in an increasingly post-Christian society. In his book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Left Conquered Everything,[3] the brilliant young cultural analyst Christopher Rufo traces the origins of CRT/Wokism, showing how America has been quietly taken over by the ideological heirs of 1960s radical neo-Marxists.[4] In his groundbreaking research of contemporary Western culture, Rufo discovered a “hideous face of revolution” that is “a rot spreading through American life. The country’s foundations are starting to shake loose.” If this is true, we all need to know about it.
America is easily seduced by false notions of reality. One recent study found that the median number of people in a Christian congregation in America in 2023 is 60—less than half of what it was twenty years ago, when the number was 137. This steep decline has been called the “Great De-churching” of America.[5] Any respect for or worship of the Creator-Redeemer God is virtually absent.[6]
People cannot live without morals, since God created an ethical universe. Those who reject God’s moral order are now busy normalizing LGBTQ ideology, eliminating the nuclear family, and living according to the moral norms of neo-Marxist wokism. Marxism is thoroughly anti-Christian, denying the being of God and seeing matter as ultimate. It worships the creature rather than the Creator (Rom. 1:25).
Marx had a close friendship with the radical New Testament scholar Bruno Bauer, who claimed that the Christian Gospels were forgeries. Marx himself believed it was necessary to “recognize as the highest divinity the human self-consciousness itself,”[7] thereby dismissing God. Today’s Critical Race Theory is a modern form of atheism derived from Marxism, as we shall show. CRT embraces postmodern “truth,” which does not come from God but is instead an expression of human power.
Many—even Christians[8]—are abandoning their personal faith in the God of Scripture and seeking a new source of morality. Wokism’s false morality plays skillfully on the sensitive conscience of young Americans.
The Marxist Framework of Oppression
White supremacy theory argues, in classic Marxist fashion, that society is always divided into oppressors and the oppressed. In today’s framework, whites are cast as oppressors, and minorities—particularly Blacks, women, illegal aliens, and LGBTQ groups—are cast as the oppressed. Biblical morality is therefore viewed as oppressive, especially its standards of sexual behavior.
As noted in my previous article, Stanley Ridgley has done excellent research on the semi-religious movement of wokism in his book Brutal Minds (2023).[9] The subtitle describes his findings well: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities. Ridgley documents a deliberate effort by university administrators not only to undermine classical academic thinking, but also to instill a profound sense of ideological—and quasi-religious—guilt.
I have often wondered why the history of the West, and of America in particular, is no longer taught in American universities. Jesse Jackson’s 1987 rallying cry at Stanford University comes to mind: “Hey ho, what d’ya know, Western civ has got to go.” We now see that, indeed, it did.
Wokism as Cultural Control
Wokism is a progressive political program that has infiltrated American culture—government administrations, corporations, and educational institutions—where DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) officers are empowered to “cancel” anyone who does not comply with the new rules. This “hideous system,” to use Rufo’s term, is dangerous precisely because it presents itself as virtuous, claiming to seek social justice and oppose racism.
Cultural analysts trace its roots to the Sixties Cultural Revolution. Rufo explains that when violent revolutionary movements such as the Black Panthers failed, radical intellectuals turned instead to ideological transformation. They abandoned street violence in favor of “a long march through the institutions,” making cultural revolution a philosophical project developed within universities and bureaucracies.
This strategy originated with the Frankfurt School—German Jewish Marxists who fled Hitler’s Germany and relocated to Columbia University. One of them, Herbert Marcuse, later moved to the West Coast and became highly influential among radical students. Marcuse and Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke (who coined the phrase “the long march through the institutions”) were collaborating as early as 1966. In 1971, Marcuse wrote approvingly to Dutschke:
“Let me tell you this: that I regard your notion of the ‘long march through the institutions’ as the only effective way.”[10]
Marcuse predicted that if Western society could be liberated from capitalist repression, its moral and religious foundations would collapse. Rather than a dictatorship of the proletariat, he proposed “a dictatorship of the intellectuals.” This neo-Marxism is the intellectual foundation of Critical Race Theory.
Marcuse also provided the theoretical basis for modern “cancel culture.” Long before the term existed, he defended “repressive tolerance”—the suppression of dissenting ideas in favor of progressive ones. Liberalism, once rooted in free speech, has lost its footing. As one observer noted, by the 2020s it had become “a marginal belief held by a few college professors at odds with society.”[11]
Marcuse reframed the Marxist revolution around race rather than class, thus transforming racism into a revolutionary ideology. As Rufo documents, this movement has reshaped language, law, and historical interpretation, gaining control of institutions and redefining public orthodoxy.
Race as a Marxist Weapon
Almost by accident, I came across a little-known fact crucial to understanding the modern attacks on white supremacy, white privilege, and white anger.[12] The accusation of racism as a political weapon is not new.
Its origin was documented by African-American eyewitness Manning Johnson in Color, Communism and Common Sense (1958).[13] Johnson described a deliberate effort by Soviet and American communists in the 1930s to undermine American institutions by portraying the nation as irredeemably racist. The goal was to create “a common front against the white oppressors.”
Johnson revealed that Stalin himself devised the strategy in 1928 to use “Negroes as the spearhead” for revolutionary agitation. American communist leaders cynically promoted racial conflict as a “cold-blooded struggle for power.”[14] The objective was simple: make “the white man’s system” responsible for everything.[15]
“Smear is a cardinal technique,” Johnson wrote. “Black rebellion was what Moscow wanted. Bloody racial conflict would split America.”[16]
Ironically, Marxists themselves showed little regard for Black people. Walter Williams noted that Marx dismissed Blacks as closer to the animal kingdom.[17] Robert Robinson, a Black American who lived forty-four years in the Soviet Union, testified that Soviet anti-racism was one of the greatest propaganda myths ever created.[18]
Neo-Marxism Today
Marcuse argued that racial conflict was the new axis of revolution. He rejected free speech and free assembly as dangers to revolutionary justice and promoted “liberating tolerance”—intolerance toward the political Right. Today’s revolution is no longer based on class and economics but on identity and race. Whiteness is portrayed as inherently guilty, while minority identities are defined primarily by oppression.
According to Marti Gurri, “nothing like the woke DEI ideology has transpired since the conversion of Constantine.” Nearly every major American institution—government,[19] universities, corporations, media, and the military—has adopted DEI ideology. Employees can be fired for challenging its definitions. We see the early formation of a soft fascism uniting state, media, and corporate power.
The failed Disinformation Governance Board demonstrated how close we came to institutionalized speech control. Though premature, such efforts may return.
Angela Davis praised Marcuse as the intellectual leader of the New Left and declared: “We cannot combat racism until we have destroyed the whole system.” This explicitly ties wokist racism to Marxism.
Objective Christian Reality
Political control of speech and behavior marks a critical stage in the advance of cultural Marxism. Though Rufo does not directly address theology, he warns that abandoning Christian morality and constitutional liberalism risks a Weimar-like collapse.[20] To sum up, wokism is the invention of Sixties Western neo-Marxists to undermine American history, especially its Christian elements, by dismissing them as “racist.”
Human beings cannot survive without God’s law. Christians are therefore called to proclaim God as both Creator and Redeemer, as Paul declares in 2 Corinthians 4:6:
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Though the future may appear bleak, God’s creation still testifies to His glory. Those drawn to the Creator may yet be drawn to the Redeemer, who welcomes all who place their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Footnotes
[1] Jones, Peter, Wokism: The New Pagan Morality, https://truthxchange.com/?s=Wokism
[2] Bond, Paul, Newsweek, “Has Hamas Hastened the Demise of ‘Woke’” (Nov 6, 2023).
[3] Rufo, Christopher, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023).
[4] Page references in brackets refer to Rufo’s book.
[5] Henrickson, Charles, “Christ Will Build His Church” (Sermon, Oct 29, 2023).
[6] Doyle, Rob, UnHerd, Aug 2023.
[7] Skousen, W. Cleon, The Naked Communist (2017), 40.
[8] Miles, Lucas, Woke Jesus (2023); Robles, A.D., Social Justice Pharisees (2022).
[9] Ridgley, Stanley, Brutal Minds (2023), x.
[10] Marcuse, Herbert, Collected Papers, vol. 6, 336.
[11] FrontPageMag, “The University States of America.”
[12] Collins & Jun, White Out (2017), 72–73.
[13] Johnson, Manning, Color, Communism and Common Sense (1958).
[14] Johnson, ibid., 37.
[15] Johnson, ibid., 44–54.
[16] Hippolito, Joseph, FrontPageMag, Sep 24, 2020.
[17] News-Herald, Aug 16, 2020.
[18] FrontPageMag, Feb 2021.
[19] RealClearInvestigations, Feb 14, 2023.
[20] Rufo, Christopher, Substack (Oct 21, 2023).
America’s culture wars mask a deeper crisis: a shared nihilism defined by destruction and the will to power. How do we rebuild meaning through a restored sacred order?
We have moved beyond postmodernism, but the contours of post-postmodernism are not quite clear. The next phase based on the premises of postmodernism is nihilism with its loss of meaning, animated resentment and violence, and drive for power…Our is a moment that calls for more than the taken-for-granted status quo. Nihilism is the frontline in the West’s missional challenge…We need a new generation of liminal leaders who are up to the task.
For decades, many believed America was divided between the Right and the Left, conservatives and liberals, believers and secularists. This is the framework used by cable news services. But sociologist James Davison Hunter now argues that this map no longer helps us. The deeper reality is that both sides share the same underlying condition: a culture of nihilism.
“Nihilistic culture,” Hunter writes, “is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power.” This is now our common world. As such it is our missional front line.
The real question for leaders is no longer; how do we win the culture war? The real question is, how do we rebuild meaning itself?
This requires restoring what the West has lost: a shared sacred order. Without it, a society cannot endure. Technology, prosperity, and politics cannot substitute for it. A culture cannot survive on material gains when its spiritual and moral foundation has crumbled. Rebuilding this sacred order requires liminal leaders in the church, people able to navigate this in-between time between the old, collapsing order and what comes next.
Collapse of the Sacred Canopy
Sociologists like Émile Durkheim, Peter Berger, and Philip Rieff saw this long before it arrived. They warned that modernity would hollow out the structures that give life moral shape. They warned that expressive individualism would dissolve the bonds that hold communities together. They warned that without a shared sacred order; societies unravel into confusion and conflict.
We now live in that reality.
Meaning has thinned. Institutions have weakened. Identity has become weightless and self-invented. Extreme violence is daily news. Reality itself is contested.
The symptoms are all around us, but they are symptoms of a far more lethal systemic metastasizing disease than many imagine.
We are not simply lost. We have lost our ability to find the way home. When Hunter asks whether we have the cultural resources to reverse this decline, his implied answer is sobering, “very few.” This is why liminal leadership must focus not on tactics but on foundations—not on arguments but on architecture. Renewal begins by rebuilding the deep structures of culture.
A sacred order rests on three legs:
Authority — the vertical source and story of truth and obligation.
Plausibility — the social and institutional environment that reinforces belief.
Ritual — the embodied practices that sustain identity and community.
Remove one, and the structure falls. Our culture has lost all three. Renewal requires restoring each one. Let us take them one at a time.
Recovering Sacred Authority
Every society needs a story that rises above personal preference. Without it, people become their own sources of truth, and society dissolves into competing wills. Today, the modern creed is simple: “You do you.” But a culture grounded only in personal choice cannot endure. Freedom without form is chaos. Authority is not about domination; it is about acknowledging that reality has a shape. It means we live in a moral universe—one we did not create but one with which we must align.
Modern people believe morality is a personal preference. But morality is not invented; it is discovered. It arises from the structure of creation. Marriage, sexuality, identity, truth—all have meaning because the created world has meaning and design. Ethics has a metaphysical basis.
We cannot rebuild authority with data alone. People live by stories. They trust what captures their imagination. They are shaped more by images than arguments. To rebuild authority, we must offer a compelling, beautiful, and true story about life. The rebuild starts with the imagination and often with artists.
This is why the Christian story is central. Rather than the simplified idea of “Believe so you can go to heaven,” Scripture presents a grand narrative: God is actively restoring everything and calls His people to join Him in that renewal today.
Theologian N.T. Wright reminds us that the Christian hope is not escape from the world but transformation in and of the world. Heaven is not a distant realm but the power of God’s future breaking into the present. “On earth as it is in heaven” is more than a prayer, it’s our mission now. This creational story grounds authority. It explains who we are, why we exist, what life is for, and where history is headed. Without it, we drift into the emptiness of self-invention.
Churches unintentionally weaken sacred authority by focusing on an individualistic theory of change:
“Change hearts, change society.”
“Get everyone to believe the same worldview.”
“Focus on personal faith.”
But culture does not change one individual at a time. Culture is not the aggregate of individual choices. Culture is a normative invisible reality, a separate thing, created through institutions, networks, symbols, and shared imagination that define reality for all others in a manner that is largely taken-for-granted. Cultural change is not about mass mobilization but reality-defining worldmaking. Most evangelical institutions and ministries in America have adopted an understanding of culture and a theory of cultural change that is false and will fail.
LISTEN: Interview with Dr. Norman Fried, psychologist & professor, HERE
The American left no longer treats immigration enforcement as a policy question. Instead, enforcement itself is treated as a moral crime. That shift has produced what can only be described as ICE derangement syndrome—a pattern of hysteria, distortion, and dehumanization aimed at federal agents carrying out the law.
Dr. Norman Fried, a clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma and behavior, explained how this mindset forms and why it is becoming more dangerous.
ICE exists for a simple reason: to enforce immigration law and remove individuals who have no legal right to remain in the country, particularly criminals. That mission did not suddenly become controversial. What changed was the political incentive structure.
The left learned that demonizing ICE generates outrage, donations, social media engagement, and ideological loyalty. Facts became optional, and the Left began acting on emotion.
Dr. Fried described how group psychology replaces individual moral reasoning. People stop evaluating claims independently and instead adopt whatever narrative their political environment promotes.
Within that sphere, exaggeration is rewarded. ICE agents are no longer officers enforcing statutes; they are recast as “terrorists,” “fascists,” or “kidnappers.” Once that framing takes hold, confrontation feels justified and even heroic.
The consequences are real, and tragic. Demonization erodes trust in law enforcement, encourages resistance to lawful orders, and increases the likelihood of violence.
When activists are told that ICE represents an evil regime rather than a legal authority, they feel morally licensed to obstruct, harass, or attack agents.
The irony is that the left’s narrative ignores who actually benefits from weakened enforcement. It is not families seeking opportunity. Rather, it is cartels, traffickers, and repeat offenders who exploit chaos. A border without consequences is not compassionate; it is predatory.
Trump understands that reality. Deterrence works because it disrupts criminal incentives. Enforcement saves lives by restoring order.
Dr. Fried emphasized that movements driven by emotion rather than fact tend to escalate.
Each claim must be more extreme than the last to maintain attention and cohesion. That is why “ICE is bad” turned into “ICE is evil,” which turned into “ICE must be abolished.”
There is no limiting principle once reality is replaced by feeling.
ICE derangement syndrome is really about control—control over narrative, over language, and over who is allowed to speak.
A country that cannot enforce its laws cannot protect its people. Demonizing the agents tasked with enforcement only makes our society more dangerous.
In my ever-growing bibliography of good books on AI, transhumanism and related issues (now well over 50 volumes), I have included in it this one: Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth (Particular Books, 2025).
Although his book is much more than about things like AI, the entire volume really is about the humanist and transhumanist Machine. The new technologies are as much about replacing God (or inventing a new god) as the old Machine ideologies such as Marxism were.
In this article I will look at his more specific remarks about AI, Silicon Valley and the push for technological immortality. I will confine myself to three of his chapters:
Ch. 20 “What Progress Wants”
Ch. 21 “God in the Age of Iron”
Ch. 22 “The Universal”
In the first of these chapters he reminds us that the Machine is not just political or economic or ideological – it is also spiritual. So he asks us to consider what the theology of it is. As a Christian, he is aware of what the New Testament calls “principalities and powers” – things that wish us ill, but things that the Enlightenment was supposed to have debunked centuries ago.
He looks at the various Silicon Valley figures such as Kevin Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg and Ray Kurzwell who have spoken of how technology is growing and developing into that of a living organism with self-awareness and the ability to reproduce. He writes:
Our job, they seem to imply, is simply to service it as it rolls forward under its own steam, remaking everything in its own image, rebuilding the world, turning us, if we are lucky, into little gods. They never consider where this story has been heard before. They never confront, or seem to even comprehend, what Illich or Guénon or even Ginsberg would have known, and which many a saint would confirm if they could hear the technium’s new story: that ‘AI’, on the right lips, can sound like just another way of saying ‘AntiChrist.’ (p. 221)
The rush to perfection and immortality means uprooting everything:
Modernity, in the final accounting, took aim at all authority, all tradition, everything rooted and everything past. . . . [T]he end result of modernity’s revolutions would be the rise of a ‘new totalitarianism’. This time around it would not involve jackboots and uniforms. Instead, it would be a technocracy built on scientism and implemented by managerial elites, designed to ensure that order could continue after modernity had ripped up all former sources of authority and truth. . . . Create a void, in other words, and into it will rush monsters. (p. 227)
In the next chapter he goes on to speak of progress and the Machine and what it all means: “No matter how many words I write trying to pin it down, it is never at root any more than this: a sacrilegious treatment of a sacred world.” (p. 234)
But the God who is there will not disappear just because mankind wants him to. Furthermore, being made in His image means we can never fully jettison our Creator. God keeps coming back into the picture:
Religion in the West is effectively dead, and yet our inherent human sense of the sacred is not. In this reign of quantity, we are assured that there is nothing beyond this life, and therefore nothing that we should not try to bend into our preferred shape here and now. But at the same time, we cannot abolish our hunger for the transcendent. We are no longer interested in God, and yet God is still interested in us. And so, we must create a faith appropriate to the times. We must divine our sacred values in a society that presumes our purpose in life to be self-creation in a borderless, post-natural world. (p. 237)
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Kingsnorth, Paul (Author)
Indeed, says Kingsnorth, the Machine is now seeking to generate its own religion. He describes some of the characteristics of this new transhumanist religion – a combination of the older New Age Movement with modern technology:
All hierarchy, dogma and tradition are rejected, replaced by self-worship and self-creation. Everything is relative—who’s to say what’s right or wrong, after all?—and the ultimate aim of the entire exercise is self-creation through technology. The Age of Aquarius slides smoothly into the age of transhumanism as we seek, openly now, to become the gods we always wanted to be, using technology as the force which will get us there.
The last of these pseudo-dogmas is the most important. We are headed very quickly now, and increasingly openly, towards the endgame of this whole project: transhumanism, the attempt to both immortalise ourselves and to build new intelligences alongside us that will act as our servants in the new age we are making. This is the salvation offered by the religion of the Machine. You will be like gods, knowing good and evil. How can a human become like a god? By doing what gods do: creating. And how can a human create? Through our unique gift: the power of technology. And so the religion of the future, the debased faith of the Machine age, the self-built theology of a people who worship the strongest thing in the world, will end where it all began: in an attempt to self-divinise. (pp. 242-243)
The chapter closes with these ominous words: “The crisis of the modern world is not a crisis of technology or politics or greenhouse gases. It is a spiritual war. What the Machine represents is our ultimate rebellion against nature: against reality itself. We have seen this rebellion before. Now our culture’s rejection of its spiritual core has opened us up to powers and principalities that we have no idea how to manage, or even understand.” (p. 243)
And the next chapter opens with even more ominous words: “The Internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. This is an extreme statement, but I’m in an extreme mood.” (p. 244)
He then speaks about something that I have been warning quite a lot about lately: how even Christians and many churches are falling for the AI craze. He writes:
In a Catholic church in Warsaw, Poland, sits SanTO, an AI robot which looks like a statue of a saint, and is ‘designed to help people pray’ by offering Bible quotes in response to questions. Not to be outdone, a protestant church in Germany has developed a robot called – I kid you not – BlessU-2. BlessU-2, which looks like a character designed by Aardman Animations, can ‘forgive your sins in five different languages’, which must be handy if they’re too embarrassing to confess to a human.
Perhaps this tinfoil vicar will learn to write sermons as well as ChatGPT apparently already can. ‘Unlike the time-consuming human versions, AI sermons appear in seconds – and some can be quite good!’ gushed a Christian writer recently. When the editor of Premier Christianity magazine tried the same thing, the machine produced an effective sermon, and then did something it hadn’t been asked to do. ‘It even prayed’, wrote its interlocutor; ‘I didn’t think to ask it to pray…’
Funny how that keeps happening.
On and on it goes: the gushing, uncritical embrace of the Machine, even in the heart of the temple. The blind worship of idols, and the failure to see what stands behind them. Someone once reminded us that a man cannot serve two masters -but then, what did he know? Ilia Delio, a Franciscan nun who writes about the relationship between AI and God, has a better idea: gender-neutral robot priests, which will challenge the patriarchy, prevent sexual abuse and tackle the fusty old notion that ‘the priest is ontologically changed upon ordination.’ AI, says Delio, ‘challenges Catholicism to move toward a post-human priesthood.
‘Behold’, intones BlessU-2, quoting the Book of Revelation, ‘I make all things new’. (pp. 247-248)
A final quote to give us a bit of hope. Not everyone is thrilled where the Machine is taking us. Says Kingsnorth about a March, 2023 development:
[M]ore than 12,000 people, including scientists, tech developers and notorious billionaires, issued a public statement of concern about the rapid pace of AI development. ‘Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth’, they wrote, with ‘potentially catastrophic effects on society.’ Calling for a moratorium on AI development, they proposed that ‘powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.’ (p. 250)
That is a start, but the issue is this: Is it too little too late? Is the genie now out of the bottle for good?
Future articles will look further at this very important book.
Our postmodern relativism and constructivism, combined with our technology, threaten to bring on the collapse of our shared reality, which would make our democracy and our social order impossible. So warns an expert in her prediction for 2026.
We’ve been making predictions about what 2026 might hold–and there is still time to make yours (go here)–and so have other publications.
Politico asked experts in various fields, “What is the unpredictable, unlikely but entirely plausible thing that could happen in 2026 that could completely upend American life?”
One of the answers jumped out at me as describing well what our relativism, constructivism, and reality-bending technology can lead to.
‘Society enters a state of psychosocial freefall’
The shift in this scenario is from today’s highly polarized but still shared world — where groups interpret events differently — to a fractured reality in which the events themselves cannot be verified, origins cannot be traced, and no authoritative source can prove what is real. Instead of opposing political narratives and conspiracy theories, society enters a state of psychosocial freefall where AI creates a series of parallel realities. It will mark a transition not from disagreement to deeper disagreement, but from disagreement to the collapse of a shared reality altogether.
This leads to the upending of the midterm elections. Ultra-realistic deepfakes flood the infosphere. One week before the election, a deepfake shows one candidate accepting a bribe from a foreign government. Minutes later, another deepfake shows the opposing candidate calling for the abolition of elections. Both clips go viral before fact-checkers can respond. AI instantly generates thousands of supporting “eyewitness accounts,” each with hyper-realistic voices, backstories and social profiles. In the following days, AI-generated “leaked documents” allege voting manipulation, foreign hacks and corrupted ballots. The public no longer mistrusts the government. They mistrust reality.
Democratic institutions prove incapable of responding at digital speed. While verification protocols are debated, AI systems generate thousands of new, contradictory narratives every hour. Trust erodes. Civic responsibility withers. Fragmented truth enclaves harden into antagonistic tribes. Citizens become more apathetic. Institutional authority collapses. The vacuum is quickly filled by fast-moving authoritarian actors and ever-more powerful tech platforms that step in as the new arbiters of “truth.”
As I have been showing in my books Postmodern Times and Post-Christian, the dominant worldviews of our time have already rejected the notion of objective truth in favor of relativism (“what’s true for you may not be true for me”) and constructivism (“we create our own truths”). This has been a philosophy. But now, with AI and virtual reality, we have the technology to actualize that philosophy!
And if we all have our own truths and truth is nothing more than a construction–whether by an individual’s choices or by a culture or by a group in power–then we have no “shared reality” that makes society or even human relationships possible!
Orange here cite the political implications of this mindset. There can be no democracy, no self-government, no community, no social identity whatsoever if there is a “collapse of a shared reality.” There can be, I suppose, “authoritarian actors” who impose their reality by exercising power over the rest of us, though this is just capitulating to the postmodernist “critical theory.”
What we need is to recover the objectivity of truth. Not just the scientific, rationalistic view of truth that modernism tried, which led to the reaction of postmodernism. A truth that includes, in addition to physical reality, moral and spiritual reality. That’s the kind of shared reality that can bring people together in relationships, societies, cultures, and civilizations.
The phrase “sheep in wolves’ clothing” caught me off guard when a friend recently used it to accuse me of being a political progressive in disguise—a supposed infiltrator pretending to be a conservative. It blindsided me, not because I feared the label, but because it revealed how fractured our moral and political rhetoric has become. I hadn’t changed much, but the public square around me had. Our definitions of conservatism, liberty, and morality have drifted so far from their roots that holding to their original meaning now looks subversive.
When I reflect on what shaped my convictions, I return to the 1990s and early 2000s. It was my mentor, Don Tack, who first introduced me to Jack Kemp—the “bleeding-heart conservative” who spoke passionately about economic opportunity, racial inclusion, and the rule of law as inseparable pillars of a just society. Don also handed me Marvin Olasky’s “The Tragedy of American Compassion,” which chronicled how 19th-century faith-based charities effectively fought poverty through discerning, personal aid that demanded work and moral renewal. That same conviction brought me to the Acton Institute, which defended the moral and theological case for free markets as a means of empowering the poor and marginalized, seeing liberty not as license but as responsibility under the rule of law. Around the same time, I resonated with thinkers at Reason Magazine and the Cato Institute. While I never embraced every libertarian conclusion, I appreciated their classical liberal roots: a belief that limited government, voluntary association, and free exchange best protect human dignity.
A rich blend of theological, philosophical, and economic influences shaped my views on social justice. From John Perkins, the father of Christian racial reconciliation, I learned the importance of local empowerment and community stabilization through his Christian Community Development (CCD) model. Perkins began calling for reconciliation between Black and White Christians rooted in the Gospel as early as the mid-1970s, long before it became a fashionable slogan in evangelical circles. His approach insisted that justice and mercy must work together through discipleship, community renewal, and shared life.
To this foundation, I add the scholarship of Anthony Bradley, whose work on criminal justice reform, fatherlessness, and Christian Personalism calls Christians to see human beings not as categories, but as image-bearers. True justice, he argues, cannot exist without moral formation, responsibility, and family stability.
Likewise, Rachel Ferguson, in Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, demonstrates that the classical liberal tradition—with its emphasis on voluntary associations, free markets, and civil society—was not abstract philosophy. Black Americans leveraged fraternal orders, mutual aid societies, churches, business networks, and family structures to create strongholds of flourishing and self-determination even under segregation. Yet Ferguson also exposes what was missing: the rule of law was not applied impartially to Black citizens. Freedom existed on paper, but not in practice. Her work reminds us that the rule of law, without partiality, is indispensable for human flourishing—for every community, every class, every race.
Bradley and Ferguson both model a humane classical liberalism that resists hyper-individualism and insists that freedom, virtue, and community belong together.
The more I studied these thinkers, the more I realized that this older tradition—rooted in moral realism, respect for law, and concern for human dignity—is largely forgotten in our polarized age. The framework Thomas Sowell described in A Conflict of Visionshelped me see why: the constrained vision of human nature, once central to conservatism, has been replaced in both major parties by the temptation of cultural domination.
So when I critique my own political tribe, it isn’t because I’ve abandoned conservatism or because I secretly belong to another movement. I critique my own side because I want to recover its moral core.
Reviving civility in this country will not come through political victories or viral takedowns. It will begin when each of us is willing to hold our own side accountable. But motives matter. Calling out our own must never be about virtue signaling, public approval, or trying to impress the broader culture. Moral correction only has credibility when it is driven by love for truth.
This matters because the alternative is already infecting our public discourse. Even a month after Charlie Kirk’s tragic death, instead of empathy, some corners of the internet continue to respond with mockery. A far-left political influencer named Kyle Kuluski, with over 2 million subscribers on YouTube, posted a grotesque meme on X that went viral, mocking Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, as a “fake grieving widow grifter.” The image depicted Erika with smeared mascara and money spilling from her hands, as if her grief were nothing more than a performance for profit.
That wasn’t satire. It was cruelty. A woman had just lost her husband to brutal violence, and her mourning was turned into a spectacle for cheap likes and ideological vengeance.
And conservatives are not innocent in this cultural decay either. At Charlie Kirk’s own memorial service, Stephen Miller used the moment not primarily to honor a fallen friend, but to caricature progressives as the embodiment of evil and corruption. It wasn’t a eulogy; it was dehumanization delivered as a political rallying cry, taking away from Erika’s message of forgiveness in Jesus towards her killer.
Not to be outdone, it was recently revealed in Virginia that progressive lawmaker Jay Jones stirred controversy by sending a series of private text messages in 2022 in which he fantasized about shooting then-House Speaker Todd Gilbert, including an imagined scenario where Gilbert would “get two bullets to the head.” Jones later acknowledged the texts, apologized publicly, but remained his party’s nominee. That wasn’t dissent or principled disagreement. It was imagining violence towards a political adversary. What’s worse is that Jones was still elected as Virginia’s Attorney General on November 6th.
However, this isn’t a call to never critique the other side. Hardly. Evil is evil—and it should be exposed wherever it appears. Nor is this an indictment of those who publicly challenge the values, beliefs, and behaviors of the political opposition that differ from their own.
When we lose the ability to hold our own echo chambers accountable, conversation collapses. As Charlie Kirk himself once said, “When discourse ends, violence begins.”
Nevertheless, Politics and cultural renewal alone will never be able to restore what has been broken. We as a nation have tried identity politics, outrage, celebrity pastors, moral posturing, and even social media shame—and none of it has produced repentance or virtue. If anything, it has made us more cynical. A genuine spiritual revival is necessary to restore moral seriousness in our public life. Some have suggested that it might already be underway with Gen-Z, as more twenty-somethings rediscover faith, community, and purpose beyond partisan political tribes. If that’s true, then the next cultural renewal won’t start in Washington or on social media, but in living rooms, campus ministries, churches without global platforms, and local friendships—places where hearts actually change, transformed by Jesus.
Maybe then, the future of civility will be built one courageous conversation at a time.
And maybe—just maybe—that’s how liberty finds its soul again.
No culture can last without boundaries and limits:
That worldlings can greatly misunderstand and misconstrue what tolerance is all about is understandable. That so many Christians can do the same is not. But of course the long-standing meaning of the term ‘tolerance’ has changed radically over recent times.
It used to reflect the well-known adage attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. One could disagree – and disagree strongly – with what someone had said yet still tolerate the person saying it.
Tolerance of course presumes disagreement. If you love your wife and agree on most things, you have no need to tolerate her. But today the notion of tolerance has been turned on its head. Now tolerance means you must agree with what the other person is saying, or you are a narrow-minded bigot, and guilty of the sin of intolerance!
And this is used all the time by the secular left. If you dare to differ with them and their beliefs, values, lifestyles and activities, you are an evil intolerant hater who should be removed from polite society. So if you dare to insist that marriage is between a man and a woman, that children have a fundamental right to their own mother and father, that killing babies if not morally acceptable, or that Islam is not a religion of peace, you are called every name in the book.
There is now NO tolerance coming from the secular left even though they are the ones shouting ‘tolerance’ the loudest and the most often. So the conservative and Christian just has to expect this as the new normal. But of course this is a recipe for cultural and civilisational suicide.
No one and no nation can last long in a ‘let’s just tolerate everything and condemn nothing’ climate. It is a path to certain ruin. Without drawing boundaries and maintaining limits, we are just in a moral and mental meltdown. The Christian should know this.
Scripture makes this clear. Recall that God himself is NOT tolerant and does not wink at everything. As Habakkuk, speaking of God, puts it in Habakkuk 1:13: “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.” And Paul said this: “Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good” (Romans 12:9).
We should never tolerate that which is evil, sinful, false, or contrary to Scripture. As our Lord said of the church in Thyatira in Revelation 2:20-21: “But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols.I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality.”
Years ago A. W. Tozer had it right when he said in Man: The Dwelling Place of God:
A new Decalogue has been adopted by the neo-Christians of our day, the first word of which reads ‘Thou shalt not disagree;’ and a new set of Beatitudes too, which begins ‘Blessed are they that tolerate everything, for they shall not be made accountable for anything.’ It is now the accepted thing to talk over religious differences in public with the understanding that no one will try to convert another or point out errors in his belief. . . . Imagine Moses agreeing to take part in a panel discussion with Israel over the golden calf; or Elijah engaging in a gentlemanly dialogue with the prophets of Baal. Or try to picture our Lord Jesus Christ seeking a meeting of minds with the Pharisees to iron out differences.
Archbishop Fulton J Sheen was quite right to put it this way “America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance — it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.”
Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World by Mouw, Richard J. (Author)
And more recently Richard J. Mouw put it this way in his 1992 book, Uncommon Decency:
Christian civility does not commit us to a relativistic perspective. Being civil doesn’t mean that we cannot criticize what goes on around us. Civility doesn’t require us to approve of what other people believe and do. It is one thing to insist that other people have the right to express their basic convictions; it is another thing to say that they are right in doing so. Civility requires us to live by the first of these principles. But it does not commit us to the second formula. To say that all beliefs and values deserve to be treated as if they were on a par is to endorse relativism – a perspective that is incompatible with Christian faith and practice. Christian civility does not mean refusing to make judgments about what is good and true. For one thing, it really isn’t possible to be completely nonjudgmental. Even telling someone else that she is being judgmental is a rather judgmental thing to do!
As I have said, this push for non-judgmentalism and tolerance and reckless acceptance of all things harms us all, and harms cultures and nations as well. Let me finish by speaking to this a bit further. And one new article on this nicely fits the bill.
A short-ish piece by Samuel Gabriel titled “The Limits of Tolerance: When Open Societies Become Suicide Pacts” is worth sharing here in full. He says this:
The philosophical foundation of liberal democracy, that a society should tolerate diverse viewpoints and ways of life, contains a fundamental paradox identified by philosophers like Karl Popper: if a society extends unlimited tolerance to those who would destroy tolerance itself, the tolerant will eventually be destroyed along with tolerance. This isn’t theoretical abstraction but observable historical pattern that plays out repeatedly across different contexts and time periods.
The mechanism operates through what might be called ideological asymmetric warfare. Groups that do not believe in pluralistic values can exploit the openness of liberal societies to advance agendas that would eliminate that very openness. They use free speech protections to spread messages advocating censorship, leverage democratic processes to gain power they would deny to others, and employ legal protections while working to dismantle the rule of law. This creates a fundamental imbalance where one side operates with constraints while the other does not.
This dynamic becomes particularly dangerous when combined with demographic change. Societies experiencing large-scale immigration from cultures with incompatible values face the additional challenge that new arrivals may not share the host society’s commitment to liberal principles. This creates a situation where the native population’s tolerance enables its own cultural and eventually political displacement by groups that would not extend the same tolerance in reverse.
The historical pattern shows that civilizations often fail to recognize this threat until it’s too late. Elite classes frequently dismiss concerns about cultural compatibility as bigotry, refusing to acknowledge that not all values systems are equally compatible with liberal democracy. Meanwhile, the practical reality is that societies require some degree of cultural cohesion and shared values to function: the more diverse a population becomes in fundamental worldview, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the consensus necessary for self-governance.
The solution cannot simply involve becoming as intolerant as the threats faced; that would mean abandoning the very values worth preserving. Instead, healthy societies must develop the wisdom to distinguish between diversity that enriches and diversity that undermines. This requires making judgments about which differences are compatible with the underlying framework and which are fundamentally antagonistic to it.
Ultimately, every society must define and defend its core boundaries, not just physical borders but cultural and ideological boundaries as well. This doesn’t mean rejecting all difference or innovation, but it does mean recognizing that not everything can be tolerated if the tolerant society itself is to survive. The alternative is the slow-motion suicide where a civilization’s virtues become the instruments of its destruction. https://samuelgabrielsg.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-tolerance-when-open
Being free of all limits, constraints and boundaries may sound quite liberating, but in the end it simply and inevitably leads to servitude, and finally, to death.
The Big State is always a big problem. The Total State has proven to be perhaps the greatest threat there is to individual freedom, economic progress, and civil rights in general. Waste, fraud, corruption and inefficiency characterise the Deep State and bloated bureaucracy. That is why conservatives of all stripes have always championed small government, limited government, and less government.
Volumes penned about this from the past century or so include these 20 important works (presented in order of publication):
The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc (1912)
The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset (1932)
Our Enemy, the State by Albert Jay Nock (1935)
The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek (1944)
Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War by Ludwig von Mises (1944)
Bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises (1956)
The American Cause by Russell Kirk (1957)
The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich Hayek (1960)
In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo by Frank Meyer (1962)
For a New Liberty: A Libertarian Manifesto by Murray Rothbard (1973)
Anarchy, State and Utopia by Robert Nozick (1974)
The Politicization of Society edited by Kenneth Templeton (1979)
Free To Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman (1980)
Freedom, Justice and the State by Ronald Nash (1980)
In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government by Charles Murray (1988)
Limited Government: A Positive Agenda by John Gray (1989)
Back on the Road to Serfdom: The Resurgence of Statism edited by Thomas Woods (2011)
Plunder and Deceit: Big Government’s Exploitation of Young People and the Future by Mark Levin (2016)
Live Free or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink by Sean Hannity (2020)
On Power by Mark Levin (2025)
On Power by Levin, Mark R. (Author)
Some of these titles might lead one to believe that I am just highlighting works by libertarians, if not anarchists. Yes, many titles are from that quarter, but certainly not all of them. Nonetheless, they all share a healthy distrust of big government and big bureaucracy. And note: most of these titles I simply culled from my 1990 book, Modern Conservative Thought.
With all this by way of background, my main purpose in this article is to share a helpful look at the current Australian situation. The Menzies Research Centre, based in Canberra, is one public policy think tank that has done a lot of work in this area. Its Executive Director, David Hughes, has just sent out an informative – and worrying – newsletter. It begins as follows:
The hefty travel bill accumulated by Australia’s Sports Minister has attracted the attention it deserved this week. But should we be surprised? There really isn’t much for a Sports Minister to do, other than fly around the country to attend sporting events.
We were already a great sporting nation before the Commonwealth Government decided in 1972 under Gough Whitlam to appoint a Minister for Sport. Prior to that, any decisions relating to “sport” that the Commonwealth had to make fell to the next most relevant Minister and portfolio. Before we had a national sports bureaucracy we had hosted an Olympics, developed our own national sporting identity and our national teams and athletes were defying the rest of the world. Bradman was averaging 99 without a Commonwealth Sport Minister to claim some of the credit.
At the time of Federation, Australia had nine Ministers with practical titles and responsibilities. This jumped to 27 under Whitlam, 30 under Hawke, and 40 under Keating. Albanese’s Ministry lists 72 different portfolio titles. We have a Tasmanian MP serving as Minister for Indigenous Health, and we have a 52 year old Minister for Youth. We have a Minister for Charities and a Minister for Pacific Islands. At times, we have also had a “Minister for the Asian Century” and a “Minister for the Centenary of Federation”. In the last term of Parliament, we had an “Assistant Minister for the Republic”, before the Prime Minister realised referendums are too hard and abolished the position.
The problem with this explosion in titles is that they all require new agencies and bureaucracies sitting behind them. And worse still, Ministers with new portfolios need to create the appearance of work — which more often involves new spending or new laws. Take our Minister for Sport. When not attending Grand Finals, she devised a $50 million grants program to help local sports groups deal with the impact of climate change.
Adding more titles, and the agencies and bureaucrats that sit behind them, creates an absurd level of complexity. This complexity not only makes it harder for citizens and businesses to navigate and interact with their government, but it also obscures reporting lines and limits accountability. It also means more taxpayer money funding jobs in Canberra. No wonder four out of every five jobs created in the past two years have been in the non-market sector.
He goes on to feature an intriguing chart on the convoluted labyrinth of “interactions between Government agencies, Ministerial portfolios and Ministers, and demonstrates how complex our Government has become.” It really is a mind-boggling chart indeed.
I have not been able to locate that chart on their website, although it may well be forthcoming soon enough. But a related article takes you to their site and offers more on our out-of-control big government behemoth here in Australia: https://www.menziesrc.org/latest-research/government-grows-growth-slows
We can be thankful that not all Australians have put up the white flag of surrender to the big government and big bureaucracy tsunami.
Lies do not seem to be going out of style. In fact, for some, they’re like a fashion trend. The truth isn’t always popular in a world of conformity, but we stand by it nonetheless. We must clothe ourselves with righteousness, not with what is trendy.
Liberals Ignore the Plight of Migrant Children
The first lie told by the Left this week involves tens of thousands of migrant children who have been rescued from human trafficking operations. While Leftists have insisted there’s nothing to see, the truth is that loose border policies have fueled and perpetuated this horrendous problem.
Border Czar Tom Homan explained,“Over 62,000 children found by the Trump Admin—children that weren’t even being looked for under the Biden Admin… Some of these children were in sex trafficking when we found them. Some were in forced labor… I can’t even discuss some of the mistreatment.”
Homan specified that “over half a million children were smuggled into this country under Joe Biden.” He further stated that Democrats “were complicit” when it came to finding trafficked children who were being sexually abused in the worst ways possible.
The Trump Administration has made border security a priority, and this shows in the data. US Customs and Border Patrol numbers reveal that there were over 301,981 encounters at the southwest border in December 2024, but this plummeted to 11,710 in October 2025 (the most recent month for which data is available).
The Left undermines national security by urging Americans to protest and even fight against ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). They claim they are “saving democracy,” but they are actually propping up a system that allows innocent children to be used and abused.
We must continue to pray that the pipeline for human trafficking is shut down completely and our border is protected.
AI as a Religion
The next lie told by the Left this week comes out of Silicon Valley, where AI flourishes and leftism soars. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, where he said that he hopes AI will become a new religion. Praising his globalist mentor, Henry Kissinger, Schmidt suggested that AI isn’t something people should take up arms against. “In magic when people don’t understand things, they either decide it’s a new religion, or they take up arms. Are we going to take up arms to AI, or make it a religion…I hope it’s a religion because I benefit.”
Schmidt went on to pose the question of what it means to be human and how mankind would cope with an artificial entity that is intellectually superior. He explained that very soon AI would be able to learn by itself without the prompting of humans.
“At some point…you get what is called recursive self-improvement, and recursive self-improvement is when it (AI) is learning on its own… if you ask the San Francisco people, they’ll say two years…if you ask me, I double that to four years, which is really soon.”
Tech Leaders Admit that AI is Dangerous
Though Schmidt said he hoped AI would become a type of religion in his interview, he admitted, “We’re running a mass experiment on human development by deploying these systems that are incredibly addictive… for young people…and they can really be manipulated. What does it mean for a child whose best friend is non-human? I don’t know… we have no data…will boys and girls ultimately rebel and say I only love humans; I hate computers? We just don’t know.”
Schmidt’s long-time friend Henry Kissinger stated at a conference in 2019 on AI and National Security that “Google is a threat to civilization as I understand it.” He added that “I’ve become convinced that AI and its surrounding disciplines is going to bring a change in human consciousness exceeding that of the Enlightenment.”
The Leftists of the tech world talk out of both ends of their mouth. On one hand, they praise AI, while on the other, they admit that it’s a threat to humanity. The core problem lies in the fact that they are not consulting the One who has all the answers about AI and human civilization–Jesus Christ.
An artificial entity should never be part of a “religion” because it’s soulless and devoid of God. Additionally, AI and humans should never be placed on the same level, either intellectually or spiritually. In the end, AI is unpredictable, especially in the wrong hands.
Evolutionist Calls Out Transgenderism
The third lie told by the Left this week revolves around evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins. It seems that even this liberal thinker is fed up with transgender ideology and its lies. Recently, he voiced his outrage on social media.
Dawkins responded to a post by famed author J.K. Rowling, where she made the point that those who support the castration of children and gender mutilation want everyone to “be nice” and use the “right” words to describe something that is utterly horrific and damaging to youth.
Rowling stated, “Either a man can be a woman, or he can’t. Either women deserve rights, or they don’t. Either there’s a provable medical benefit to transitioning children, or there isn’t. Either you’re on the side of a totalitarian ideology that seeks to impose falsehoods on society through the threat of ostracisation, shaming and violence, or you’re not. The alternative to being ‘blunt’–using accurate, factual language to describe what is going on–was to surrender freedom of speech and espouse ideological jargon that obfuscated the issues and the harms caused. We’ve always needed blunt people, but we need them most of all when being asked to bow down to a naked emperor.”
In response, Dawkins wrote, “Be nice? Yes, let’s be nice. What is NOT nice is hormonally or surgically mutilating children, cheating your way to stealing women’s athletic medals, lying your way into women’s spaces, debauching language, etc.”
Dawkins refuses to acknowledge God, but he does believe that men and women have biological characteristics that cannot be changed. Earlier this year, Dawkins left the board of an atheist advocacy group after it censored an article that argued that gender is tied to biology.
Richard Dawkins and J.K. Rowling are liberal in many areas of politics, but both are taking a stand against radical leftists who continue to defy biological reality. This isn’t easy to do because many of their liberal followers are pushing back with hatred and vitriol. Let’s pray they will continue to fight against the madness. More importantly, pray that they would have an encounter with Jesus Christ that shapes their worldview and radically transforms their lives.
These are just a few of the lies told by the Left this week. How are you praying?
Angela Rodriguez is an author, blogger, and former teacher who studies the signs of the times, as well as the historical and biblical connections between Israel and the United States. You can visit her blogs at 67owls.com and 100trumpets.com.She is also the author of Psalm 91: Under the Wings of Jesus and Hallelujah’s Great Ride. Photo Credit: Danny Butlin-Policarpo on Unsplash.
Secular society upholds universal human rights yet denies God, creating a moral contradiction. This article explores why true human dignity ultimately points to the existence of the King.
I was recently listening to the excellent ‘TRIGGERnometry’ podcast, where the hosts, Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, invited pro-Palestinian podcaster David Smith to discuss fraught topics such as Israel and Gaza. It was a fascinating (and civil!) debate about the rights and wrongs of Israel’s actions in the Middle East.
But after listening to it, what struck me was not the disagreement between the hosts and their guest, but the underlying agreement.
You see, both sides in that podcast debate tacitly agreed that there exists an objective moral standard, a moral law. This moral law is assumed to ‘exist apart from us’ that shows us what should and should not be done, regardless of how people feel about it, regardless of what a culture and people say, regardless of whether it’s in a person’s self-interest or not. And when this moral law is transgressed – whether by Hamas on October 7, or by the IDF in Gaza, there is anger and outrage, whether on the podcast or across Western societies.
While Israel and Gaza have generated a lot of moral outrage in the past few years, many other issues have also led secular people to be outraged. Just think of hot topics like abortion, transgender issues, immigration and climate change. There’s so much heat in these issues because secular people assume there’s some underlying moral law that’s being transgressed.
Or to put it more precisely, secular non-Christian people often assume a (Christian-ish) view of morality that goes something like this:
Human beings are different from animals, and therefore have inalienable, universal rights that animals don’t have. This is regardless of race, age, gender, ability, or location.
And so, whether you’re a child in Gaza today or a black woman in 1950s Alabama, secular people believe everyone, everywhere at all times has universal human rights. Which means nobody should be treated like an animal.
But this raises an urgent question. A question that we should be talking about as a society, but we’re not.
One thing we should be talking about as a society, but aren’t
Our secular Western culture, by and large, accepts this idea of universal human rights, which everyone must adhere to (even if they don’t agree with it).
On the other hand, secular society has the equally firm secular conviction that we live in a God-less, random, meaning-less universe. And that human beings are, at our core, nothing more than highly evolved animals. Secular scientists have been making this claim for 150 years since Darwin.
Thus, secular societies believe that human beings are merely animals, but must never be treated like animals.
How can both of those things be true? It’s a contradiction if ever there was one.
This contradiction is one thing we should be talking about as a society, but we’re not.
Our very civilisation depends on believing in universal human rights – in treating human beings with the dignity we afford to no other animal. It’s what has made the West a bastion of freedom and justice unseen in human history. It’s why millions of people (including my family) have flocked here.
But what reason does our secular world give for these rights?
Some attempts at reconciling this contradiction.
Now, attempts have been made to reconcile this contradiction.
Some argue that reason tells us that human beings have rights. In this view, it’s reasonable and rational to treat human beings with the dignity that we afford no other animal.
But this line of reasoning falls apart once we ask some simple questions.
Such as: Whyis it unreasonable to treat (human) animals like animals? After all, a moment’s look at the animal kingdom will tell us that violence and the survival of the fittest are the natural order of the day. The lion eats the antelope, and we don’t get morally outraged at lions. We merely see this as the natural order of things. In fact, the secular view of reality teaches that evolution is inherently violent.
So, if it’s acceptable and natural for one animal to kill another animal, whether in the African savannah or your back garden, why is it unreasonable for one human animal to kill another human animal, whether in the back alleys of your city or the rubble of Gaza? [1]
Others might point out that evolution gives us morality – that our moral instinct comes from evolution. But this view proves too much. For if evolution gave Western societies the notion that universal human rights exist (and thus we should obey this instinct), what about those societies where cannibalism and tribal warfare are the order of the day? Does that mean they should obey those instincts? Not to mention all the other moral instincts that human beings have (e.g. selfishness, greed, lust) — presumably, evolution gave us those, too. Should we be obeying them?
A more intellectually honest (but disturbing) account of morality
In the face of these conundrums, an atheist like author Yuval Noah Harari gives the game away by saying our view of human rights is nothing more than a story, a convenient fiction we’ve made up for the sake of order and convenience:
Today in the world, many, maybe most legal systems are based on this idea, this belief, in human rights. But human rights are just like [the fictional ideas of] Heaven and like God. It’s just a fictional story that we’ve invented and spread around… It is not a biological reality. Just as jellyfish, and woodpeckers, and ostriches have no rights, Homo Sapiens have no rights also.
But if our view of human rights is nothing more than a made-up story, why would we get outraged when other people don’t hold to our made-up story?
Our secular world wants the Kingdom without the King
Western societies are built on the view that every human being has rights. It’s one of the things that has led to the West flourishing over the centuries.
But if the secular view of human rights is based on a contradiction, a fiction, then where does that leave secular society?
For starters, it means secular people don’t have a compelling reason for moral outrage when human rights are abused. They don’t have a rational reason to get morally upset by the images of starving Gazans or Sudanese. It no longer makes sense to be morally upset when Africans slaughter Africans, any more than it makes sense to be morally outraged when one African animal kills another.
And yet, there is still outrage (for which I’m thankful — I don’t want to live in a society where people aren’t outraged at human rights abuses). This shows that secular society wants to have it both ways. They don’t want the God of the Bible (which led to the West’s view of human rights), and yet they still want the Bible’s view of human rights. They want the kingdom without the King.
But how long can we have the fruits of the kingdom (human rights) without the King?
Time will tell. But at the very least, without a compelling reason to uphold human rights, human rights and human exceptionalism are at risk of eroding under pressure in our secular West. Consider the brave new world of AI. Many of the AI tech leaders in Silicon Valley believe that human beings are biological machines. In their view, if silicon machines become more intelligent than us, not only should they have rights, but it would be fine if they replaced us one day. This is the view of many who are pushing AI onto us.
Human rights point to the existence of the King
But as Christians, we know that the instinct that fellow human beings must never be treated like animals is the right moral instinct.
In which case, we’re not just animals, but something far more precious. If that’s the case, then why continue believing in the atheistic view of reality?
Maybe the existence of the kingdom points to the existence of the King.
Now that would be a conversation worth having.
___
[1] Furthermore, there are many situations where doing good is entirely unreasonable, and doesn’t make rational sense. Think of the many non-Jews who risked their lives and the lives of their families to hide Jews in occupied Europe during World War 2. Was it moral for these non-Jews to hide Jews from the Nazis? Of course – it’s one of the greatest acts of morality in human history.
But was it reasonable? Well, there’s nothing more reasonable than trying to keep you and your family safe. So it was hardly reasonable for them to put their lives and the lives of their children at enormous risk for strangers.
Trump’s terrorism filing exposes America’s overlooked vulnerability: institutions that grant legitimacy too easily. This article reveals how ideological influence exploits structural gaps in open societies—and why transparency now matters most.
The moment President Trump filed the paperwork to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists — and possibly groups some officials see as similar — the conversation in Washington shifted. What had long been an uneasy whisper among analysts finally surfaced into daylight: America’s deepest vulnerabilities are not at its borders, but inside its institutions.
For years, the Brotherhood’s strategy in the West operated in the unlit spaces between civil society, law, academia, and media—spaces Western liberals treat as sacred and therefore untouched. Trump’s filing forced the United States to look directly at something it preferred to rationalise away: an ideological movement that understands open societies more intimately than the people who built them. The confrontation, after decades of evasion, has finally begun.
People talk about the Brotherhood’s influence in policy, law, institutions, and public messaging, but that list misses what’s actually happening. These aren’t separate lanes. Instead, they feed each other. When they get access to policymakers, they gain legitimacy. That legitimacy helps them in court. Court wins open the door to institutions. Then, once they’re inside, they shape the narrative to make themselves look even more legitimate. It happens fast. This is how influence moves from the margins to the centre without most people noticing. It’s not a straight line; it’s a circle that keeps strengthening itself. And unless you see how that system works, you won’t understand why the Brotherhood’s influence is so difficult to root out. It’s built to last.
Leveraging Legitimacy
A case study illustrates this far better than theory. In 2011, during the federal review of counter-extremism training materials, advocacy organisations and civil-rights groups raised concerns that some government training conflated mainstream Islam with extremism and used biased or inaccurate terminology to describe Muslim communities.
Their pressure led to a lot of terms being stripped out of official documents, not because the government decided the ideas were wrong, but because agencies were more afraid of looking biased than of being clear. That change in language ended up shaping how several departments looked at threats for years. No single group planned it, and it wasn’t some grand conspiracy. It happened because the system favoured safe-sounding language over honest accuracy.
What makes this model particularly effective in the United States is not ideology but structure. America’s First Amendment creates a nearly limitless space for advocacy, an extraordinary achievement, but also a wide-open terrain for actors skilled at framing political agendas as civil rights. American philanthropy is wide open. It’s decentralised, and there’s no real ideological screening, which makes it easy for groups to present themselves as cultural or humanitarian and tap into serious resources. In a system like ours, legitimacy isn’t handed out from the top—it spreads through networks and relationships.
Europe works differently. France can shut down organisations under laïcité. Germany can put movements under domestic intelligence watch. Britain’s PREVENT program has tools the U.S. doesn’t. America’s openness is one of its strengths—and one of its vulnerabilities.
The harder truth is that Western institutions didn’t just allow this ecosystem to grow—they played a part in creating it. Universities took money without asking many questions about what came with it. But the most disturbing part is not what the Brotherhood built—it is what Western institutions helped them build. Universities took money with no curiosity about strings attached. Philanthropies gave out grants without taking a serious look at how these groups were actually set up. DEI offices put certain people forward as “representative” simply because they fit the system, not because anyone chose them.
They weren’t infiltrated. They weren’t coerced. Stunningly, they simply opened the door and handed out authority because it felt morally safe. And the media echoed smooth, Western-sounding narratives without realising that speaking that language is part of the strategy. It all created the illusion of organic legitimacy, when in reality, much of it was institutional projection and fear.
Nothing clandestine was required. Institutional vanity, risk-aversion, and moral confusion created the perfect runway. These weren’t lapses in security; they were lapses in imagination. Our institutions assumed everyone played by the same rules. They never stopped to consider that legitimacy could be used as a tool.
Seen through the wider geopolitical lens, the pattern becomes unmistakable. The Brotherhood is not an outlier. It is an early model of a new kind of transnational ideological movement: decentralised, adaptive, fluent in the soft-power tools of modern liberalism. In the 20th century, power meant territory. In the 21st, power means legitimacy. The actors who understand this shift—state or non-state—are the ones most capable of shaping the century ahead.
The designation debate, mistakenly framed as a Trump-era controversy, is actually the first major test of whether America has the conceptual capacity to understand the ideological contest it is already inside.
Which brings us to the real subject of this moment: America’s own structural fault lines. Not political factions. Not cultural disagreements. But the deep, often invisible vulnerabilities that ideological actors can exploit with a sophistication democratic institutions never anticipated.
The Four Fault Lines of Open Societies
1. The Legitimacy Gap
Open societies often grant trust faster than they check what’s behind it. If someone speaks the language of rights and representation well, they’re treated as credible long before anyone looks at their actual beliefs.
2. The Transparency Paradox
Democracies expect transparency from governments, but almost never from civil-society groups. That leaves huge open spaces where influence can operate with little public scrutiny.
3. The Philanthropy Loophole
Billions in donor money flow into NGOs, universities, and cultural groups with almost no ideological checks. That lets influence take root through funding pipelines, not persuasion.
4. The Representation Trap
Bureaucracies end up elevating certain people as the “official voices” of whole communities, giving them authority through shortcuts rather than through any real democratic process.
These are the structural openings the Brotherhood’s model has illuminated, not through coercion, but through an intelligent reading of Western incentives.
The real issue isn’t just whether Trump’s proposed designation is justified. The real issue is what a democracy does once it realises it hasn’t been watching its weak spots. And the answer is actually simple: open societies have to expect transparency from any institution that holds influence, government or not, ideological or civic, if they want to stay open.
Transparency without turning everything into a crime. Scrutiny without assuming the worst about everyone. And a basic understanding of how institutions work—seen as a civic skill, not a partisan tool.
Because the deeper truth, the one that carries moral weight, is that a free society can survive disagreement, dissent, even radicalism. What it cannot survive is blindness. The real danger is not an ideological movement, but a democracy that no longer recognises how its own openness can be used against it.
Trump’s filing did not create that danger. It revealed it. And now the country must decide whether it has the courage to see what has been there all along.
The human brain contains ~86 billion neurons and performs 10¹⁶ to 10¹⁸ operations per second, showcasing unmatched processing power.
It adapts and rewires itself, learning from experience, making it a self-learning, self-organizing system.
Consciousness, a key feature of the brain, cannot be explained by materialism, according to Stephen Meyer.
The brain exhibits specified complexity and functional integration, suggesting it is engineered rather than an outcome of evolution.
The biblical perspective views the human mind as a reflection of the divine mind, emphasizing its unique design.
Brain Power Beyond Matter And Imagination
The human brain is often called the most complex structure in the known universe—and for good reason. With billions of neurons, trillions of synapses, and unimaginable processing power, the brain has no rival in artificial technology.
Computers outperform humans in raw arithmetic, but the brain is superior in:
energy efficiency
dynamic learning
pattern recognition
real-time environmental interaction
self-organization
creativity
awareness
This makes it arguably the most advanced information-processing system known in the universe.
Its complexity raises a compelling question: Is the brain a product of mindless evolution, or the work of an intelligent Creator?
1. The Brain’s Unmatched Processing Power
The brain contains:
~86 billion neurons
Each connecting to up to 10,000 others
Forming over 100 trillion synapses
Together, these allow the brain to perform an estimated:
10¹⁶ to 10¹⁸ operations per second
—roughly equivalent to the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
Yet the brain runs on 20 watts—less than a dim light bulb.
Supercomputers require:
huge cooling systems
warehouses full of hardware
megawatts of electricity
The brain fits into a three-pound organ between your ears.
2. A Self-Learning, Self-Organizing System
Unlike artificial computers:
the brain rewires itself
strengthens useful pathways
prunes inefficient ones
learns from experience
adapts to injury
stores memory chemically and electrically
integrates information from all senses simultaneously
This is AI—but biological, not artificial.
No machine comes close.
3. Consciousness: The Ultimate Mystery
Perhaps the most profound feature is consciousness—the existence of subjective experience, self-awareness, thought, emotion, and rationality.
Materialism cannot explain:
intentionality
abstract reasoning
logic
moral awareness
the existence of consciousness itself
Stephen Meyer emphasizes this in Return of the God Hypothesis, arguing that consciousness is not reducible to matter. Matter produces electrical signals—not thoughts, meaning, or rational deliberation.
Mind cannot emerge from non-mind.
4. The Brain Looks Engineered
The brain exhibits all hallmarks of design:
specified complexity
functional integration
information processing
efficiency
fine-tuned architecture
If an AI researcher discovered a machine with these properties, they would infer one thing:
Someone designed it.
5. Biblical Insight
Scripture describes humanity as uniquely endowed:
“God breathed into man the breath of life.” — Genesis 2:7 “We have the mind of Christ.” — 1 Corinthians 2:16
The biblical worldview has always held that the human mind is not an accident but a reflection of the divine mind.
Conclusion
The brain is a masterpiece of engineering—far beyond human invention. Its processing power, architecture, adaptability, and consciousness all point to intelligent design rather than mindless evolution. The more we learn, the more the evidence mounts: The human mind is the product of a greater Mind.
ByStuart Atkins; CHRISTIAN PROOFS; November 18, 2025
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Key Takeaways
DNA serves as a digital, information-rich code that suggests intelligent design rather than random chance.
The complexity of the human genome surpasses human-made software, featuring 3.2 billion ‘letters’ that form biological instructions.
Dr. Stephen Meyer argues that DNA contains specified digital information, which only intelligence can produce.
Life and DNA exhibit a circular dependency, as life requires DNA to exist and vice versa.
The structure of DNA aligns with the idea that rational intelligence created it, supporting a biblical worldview.
As DNA evidence is reversed engineered, evolutionary theories on human origins are collapsing.
I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist. Read on to see why…
In the last century, science has uncovered something astonishing at the heart of every living cell: a digital, information-rich code known as DNA, or Deoxyribonucleic acid. This discovery has revolutionized biology—and it has profound implications for the biggest question of all: Does life point to a Creator?
The DNA code is by far the strongest intelligent design argument for the existence of God. The latest scientific and medical DNA evidence puts the atheist on notice. If God does not exist, the burden of proof now falls on atheism or agnosticism, not theism. Apart from the “faith” or “religion” or “myth” or “wishful thinking” or “opiate of the people” arguments, the facts of DNA ushers both scientist and atheist into God’s sanctuary of intelligent creation. They can no longer escape to a naturalistic, materialist lab. Is it a Designer DNA universe with no exit?
The human genome is not random chemistry. It is a sophisticated, encoded language—far more advanced than anything humans have ever written. When examined objectively, the information within DNA strongly suggests design rather than chance. The tired evolutionary formula of time plus chance plus matter cannot explain the mind behind the DNA matter. This following explores why.
1. DNA Is a Digital, Symbol-Based Language
Every human cell contains about 3.2 billion “letters”—sequences of A, T, C, and G that form biological instructions. These are arranged in meaningful, ordered sequences that function exactly like a written code or software program.
DNA is:
Digital (only four symbols)
Ordered, not chaotic
Meaningfully arranged
Used to direct complex functions
Bill Gates once remarked:
“DNA is like a computer program, but far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”
This is not an analogy—it is a description. DNA stores, processes, and transmits information, exactly like computer code.
2. The Human Genome Surpasses Human Software
Highlights of the human genome:
One cell would fill 3,000 books of 1,000 pages each
The human body contains ~37 trillion such copies
3.2 billion base pairs arranged in a precise, sequential language
DNA uses a four-letter digital alphabet (A, T, C, G)
Molecular machines inside the cell read, copy, correct, and operate on this code
Leading scientists—even non-theists—have noticed its computer-like nature: Richard Dawkins: “The machine-code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.”
DNA compresses data with efficiency that computer scientists still cannot replicate
Every instruction to build and sustain life—from bone density to brain development—is encoded inside this language-like system.
The question is simple: Where does information come from?
In every instance we observe, information comes from a mind. Codes don’t write themselves.
3. Stephen Meyer and the Case From Information
Dr. Stephen C. Meyer—Cambridge-trained philosopher of science—argues in Return of the God Hypothesis that DNA is the single most powerful biological evidence for intelligent design.
His argument is straightforward:
DNA contains specified, digital information.
The only known cause of such information is intelligence.
Natural selection cannot begin until a self-replicating system exists.
Therefore, the origin of life requires a mind—not material processes.
Chance, chemistry, and natural selection cannot generate meaningful digital code from nothing.
4. The Origin of Life Problem
Here’s the dilemma naturalism cannot escape:
Life needs DNA to exist.
DNA needs life to copy itself.
Therefore, neither can form without the other already present.
This circular dependency is why Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA) wrote:
“The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle.”
The more we learn, the more this statement makes sense.
5. DNA and the Biblical Worldview
The Gospel of John begins with a profound statement:
“In the beginning was the Word (logos)…All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” — John 1:1–3
“Logos” means mind, intelligence, rationality. DNA is precisely the kind of system a rational mind would create.
DNA is not random. It is structured, meaningful, digital information—the kind that always comes from intelligence. The discovery of DNA gives modern science a powerful reason to affirm what Scripture has said all along: Life comes from a Mind — not from matter alone.
Final Thoughts
The naturalistic evolutionist is now caught between a coding rock and a hard decision: If evolution cannot solve the DNA question what is the materialist to do? Darwinism is in trouble and modern science is making that case clear. “Intelligent intervention” is the term that modern science is now using to explain the story DNA is telling them. See Joe Rogan’s podcast interview with Gregg Braden.
Is an infinite God lurking behind stage? It’s certainly probable. Based on the ramifications of DNA design, the decision to believe in a random universe takes more faith then rational faith in God.
Does this take us to the infinite, personal God of the bible? I believe it does. If an infinite, personal God exists why would He not want to communicate with the creatures he made in His own image. That image is defined by a specific, intentional mind. As 1 Corinthians 2:16 says: “For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he will instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ.”
“I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well.” Psalm 139:14
I have exciting news. Do you remember a long time ago, when the famous atheist professor Will Provine invited Michael Behe to make the case for intelligent design at Cornell University? Well, 22 years later, Behe has returned to Cornell, to give a lecture to students and answer questions. Let’s find out what Behe’s arguments were and whether any biologists showed up to stump him.
So, it’s always fun to start with the announcement of the event. I like to support these events because I am very passionate about events on campus where students are presented with evidence that will help them to form more accurate views about the big questions of life.
Throughout history, most people, including most scientists, thought that the intricate mechanisms of life were purposefully designed. The design hypothesis fell out of favor in academia after 1859, the year Charles Darwin instead proposed that life evolved by utterly unguided random variation sifted by natural selection. In the past 75 years, however, much has been learned about the molecular basis of life that was completely unknown in Darwin’s era. In my talk I will argue that the astonishing discoveries of modern biochemistry require a reversal of our evaluation of Darwin versus design: the conclusion that, in large part, life was purposely designed has once again become rationally compelling.
I would like to get my hands on the slides for this lecture. Roger Pielke just gave a talk at Cornell earlier this month, and he posted his slides. Maybe I can get Mike to do the same. If you have ever seen one of his lectures, he actually has fun slides – he puts Far Side cartoons into his lectures to keep people paying attention.
Anyway, here is the audio from the talk, and here are his main arguments: 1) irreducible complexity and 2) Darwinian mechanisms cannot create new forms over time.
But he actually made 5 points in the presentation:
Design is NOT mystical – it is a normal empirical conclusion from physical evidence
Everyone (even Richard Dawkins) admits biology appears to be designed.
The progress of science has revealed structural obstacles to Darwinian explanations (irreducible complexity “Darwin’s Black Box” and the discovery that most observed beneficial mutations break genes “Darwin Devolves”).
Darwinian claims still rest on imagination and “just-so stories”.
We have strong evidence for real design but almost no evidence that Darwinism can build complex molecular machines.
What was interesting about this podcast? Well, like I said, I am really, really committed to helping students to hear two sides to the big questions of life. Most of the college students that I talk to in the workplace explain to me that their process of forming their worldviews was two-fold: 1) I wanted to have fun, and 2) I wanted the smart people (professors) to like me. It was just easier for them to accept certain beliefs in the college environment, and that’s why they accepted them. A lot of things that are false are just easier to believe for social or professional reasons: the universe is eternal, the origin of life is a solved problem, the fossil record shows gradual increases in complexity, the genome is 90% junk DNA – just complete nonsense. And the best way for them to correct these false beliefs is to bring an honest scholar like Mike Behe or Mike Licona to speak about evidence at the local university campus.
The podcast is fun because they really explain all the details of what happened. Who invited Behe to speak? Where did Behe speak? Who did Behe speak to? Were biologists invited? Did any biologists show up to confront Behe? How long was the talk? How long was the Q&A? Was the tone of the Q&A calm or argumentative? Did the Q&A stop because no one had questions, or was there a long line of people waiting to ask more questions?
Confronting naturalism on campus
I have a friend named Stephanie who just loves all sorts of protests and gatherings and marches. But for me, this is much better. Instead of people yelling at each other over politics, we can actually have some evidence presented, and minds can change. Maybe not right in the moment, but afterwards. This worked well for me when I was in my 20s. I used to order dozens and dozens of lectures and debates from university campuses from places like Veritas Forum and Access Research Network. I would listen over and over, and then when I tried out the evidence on co-workers (and I mean people with graduate degrees from good schools like UIUC and Purdue and Northwestern) they always had to concede. There is just something about being able to listen to Christians speak about evidence to college students – it’s just the right level of difficulty for software guys like me to understand it and learn how to speak like that. And this led to a lot of adventures.
Secrets of the Cell with Mike Behe
Well, if you listen to the podcast, and you like it, and you want to try to explain Michael Behe’s arguments to college students yourself, he does have quite a good series of lectures posted on YouTube:
Everything is so much easier now than it used to be for me in the old days. You guys don’t have to rewind VHS tapes and audio cassettes like I used to have to do! And if you hear a word or phrase that you don’t understand, just ask Grok to explain it to you like it would explain it to a high school student. Anyway, have fun.
A new ISGAP report argues the Muslim Brotherhood has spent decades quietly shaping Western institutions through influence, not violence, using a long-term strategy most people overlook.
It paints a picture of a movement that’s been working slowly, steadily, and mostly under the radar inside the United States and Europe for decades. Not through violence, but through influence, shaping conversations, building organisations, and positioning itself inside the places where ideas, policies, and public narratives take shape. Whether someone ends up agreeing with all of this or not, the report’s core message is that the Brotherhood’s long game is far more ambitious than most Americans realise.
The following is only a summary of that report. It’s not the full story. I summarise the introduction, which frames the argument, but the rest of the report goes far deeper. If you want to understand the scale of what the authors claim is happening inside Western institutions, I’d strongly encourage you to read the report yourself. What I’m giving you here is simply the main outline.
Reshaping Public Discourse
The introduction makes a straightforward claim: the Muslim Brotherhood has spent decades working its way into Western institutions—not through violence, but through slow, deliberate influence. According to the authors, this is not scattered or improvised.
It’s a long-term strategy that uses the openness of Western democracies to reshape how officials talk, how institutions think, and how the public understands certain issues. Whether someone agrees with every conclusion or not, the introduction makes it clear that the authors see a coordinated project, not random activism.
A key idea in the report is tamkeen—the Brotherhood’s concept of gradually building power. The authors trace how that idea developed under different leaders. Al-Banna focused on personal reform and community-building. Qutb sharpened the ideology and rejected secular society outright. Qaradawi added a more practical layer for Muslims living in the West. Over time, the report says, these ideas grew into a wide-ranging strategy that works across social, political, legal, and cultural arenas at once.
The introduction leans heavily on two internal Brotherhood documents, one from 1982 and one from 1991. The 1991 memo is the well-known “civilisational jihad” document, which describes influence, not violence. The authors treat these documents as evidence that the Brotherhood mapped out a long-term plan for engaging Western institutions. They argue this explains why similar patterns appear in different countries. Whether someone fully accepts that argument or not, these documents are central to understanding the introduction.
Subtle Subversion
The authors say the strategy shows up in four main areas: (1) policy, (2) law, (3) institutions, and (4) public narratives. In policy circles, Brotherhood-aligned groups are described as gaining advisory access and shaping the language governments use on extremism. In the legal realm, the report argues that the term “Islamophobia” is often used to shut down ideological criticism.
Institutionally, it describes a network of mosques, charities, advocacy groups, student organisations, and academic programmes that reinforce one another over time. And on the narrative side, the authors point to media appearances, campus activism, and messaging around Israel and Palestine.
The introduction highlights certain moments where the authors believe the strategy becomes easier to see—after 9/11, the rise of BDS on Western campuses, and in the recent waves of activism connected to Middle East conflicts. They claim these moments expose networks that have been built slowly and quietly over decades.
The broader point the introduction makes is that this is a form of non-violent extremism. It stays inside the law. It uses the protections of democratic societies to advance ideas that aren’t especially democratic in return. That’s why, the authors argue, governments struggle to engage with it. Institutions like universities, NGOs, and media outlets often lack transparency about funding, ideological partnerships, or outside influence. In that environment, ideas can take root long before anyone notices.
This is only the introduction. The rest of the report goes further into the mechanics of influence, the networks involved, and the long-term implications for Western society. Whether you end up agreeing with the report or not, it deserves to be read closely. At the very least, it forces us to ask whether our own institutions are paying attention—or whether they’ve already been shaped by forces operating quietly in the background.
Brain-computer interfaces? Exoskeletons? Immortality? Enthusiasm for transhumanism is rising, what might it mean for the rest of us? In light of what enthusiasts are searching for, Christians can offer hope to a world searching for meaning because God has already provided it in Christ.
Brain-computer interfaces? Exoskeletons? Immortality? Enthusiasm for transhumanism is rising, what might it mean for the rest of us? Syda Productions/AdobeStock
We all know the story of Frankenstein: a scientist obsessed with discovering the secret of life puts together bits of dead people and (with the help of lightning and, usually in film adaptations, a huge lever) brings his morbid creation to life. The unfolding events in the story touch on deeply human themes—resulting in the downfall of the creator and the creation.
It is a story that seems to never age. Published anonymously in 1818 by the then 19-year-old Mary Shelley, its narrative appears to resonate with every generation.
The story captivated Guillermo del Toro, whose current remake of Frankenstein is currently topping Netflix’s streaming charts with over 29.1 million views in its first three days on the platform. For del Toro it was the fulfillment of a 20+ year old dream of his. In his unmistakable style, shaped by his challenging childhood and a fascination with the monstrous and grotesque, del Toro brings this new adaptation to our screens, receiving critical acclaim.
Warnings about human ambition and the unforeseen consequences of creating something that we can’t control.
It joins a long line of film versions, and Mary Shelley’s novel has remained in print for over 200 years. Its enduring power lies in its warnings about human ambition and the unforeseen consequences of creating something that we can’t control.
Those themes seem particularly relevant today. It’s been almost three years since ChatGPT was released to the public, and AI’s growth has been dramatic. It now speeds up tasks that once took hours and generates creative content such as images and music, while also advancing into areas like medical diagnostics and self-driving cars.
AI has become widely accepted, often without people realizing it (if you Google it, you use AI), and it’s quickly becoming a routine companion in the workplace.
Unlike God, we cannot foresee or fully grasp the consequences of what we make.
But as humans have taken on the role of the creator, we face the same conundrum as Victor Frankenstein: unlike God, we cannot foresee or fully grasp the consequences of what we make.
AI’s rapid and self-improving learning abilities give it an unpredictable quality, and there is a growing unease about that. Some people believe we are only five years away from AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), machines at least as intelligent as human beings.
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Human relationships involve compromise, challenge, and mutual growth.
Human relationships involve compromise, challenge, and mutual growth. An AI’s algorithm, by contrast, tends to offer constant affirmation.
Proverbs 27:17 says, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another”, but AI interactions function more like the warning in 2 Timothy 4:3, where people seek out voices that tell them only what their “itching ears” want to hear.
After all, what’s easier than typing your thoughts into a computer that doesn’t judge you and constantly affirms your ideas, even if they might lead you down a dark path?
This desire for control, comfort, and affirmation feeds directly into the broader transhumanist vision. Transhumanists (Elon Musk being a big advocate) believe that the future lies in merging AI with biotechnology, cryogenic preservation and bionics in an attempt to overcome human biology altogether. It is the pursuit of so-called “superhumans”, modern-day Frankenstein’s monsters.
The problem of death is not a problem to solve, because God already solved it.
So much of transhumanism is rooted in the fear of death—the pursuit of a ‘cure’ for aging and achieving a form of technological immortality, the idea that we could somehow live forever by downloading our life form to the cloud. But as theologian and bioethicist John Lennox so helpfully explains, the problem of death is not a problem to solve, because God already solved it when Jesus rose from the dead.
If transhumanists believe they will become like gods through trusting in technology, Christianity is the answer they are truly looking for. God became a human being in Jesus and through trusting him we get to become children of God.
Should we be afraid as regulators struggle to regulate on something they can’t control, and decisions seem to be left in the hands of mad billionaires?
While transhumanism raises serious questions, technology has driven remarkable advances in medical science. In October, for example, scientists restored sight to patients with macular degeneration by implanting a tiny chip at the back of the eye.
What we urgently need is a strong ethical framework.
Its direction therefore need not be defined by misuse or unchecked ambition. What we urgently need is a strong ethical framework to guide its development. One grounded in a true understanding of what it means to be human.
So what can Christians take from all of this? What should our response be? It is, as it always has been, to offer hope to a world searching for meaning. God has already approved of us humans—he became one. Human biology is not a problem to solve, or something that AI can fix so we can live forever, it is a life to be lived and then to return home to the one, true Creator.
Originally published by Being Human. Republished with permission.
Heather Carruthers is the project co-coordinator for the Evangelical Alliance’s Being Human initiative.
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